I finished all my assignment work the other day – and now there’s just a couple of exams and sure I could start studying for them, but I reckon I’d just forget it all again by the time they came around.

Unexpected backwash re: DJ stuff – there’s a doco on the history of hiphop tomorrow night on sbs called Scratch.

– Digging on some early Jamaican ska from this is ska, check out the mp3s page.

There is indeed a reason for the Alta Vista search engine to keep on existing — and it is its cataloging of audio on the net. Like this for example.
I’d never realised how many wacky DJ names there were out there, from DJ Disc Jockey to DJ Pooh. There’s even a DJ name generator for prospective DJs stuck for a name, but really anything goes — just look around you for inspiration – DJ coffee table, DJ floppy disk, DJ Keens Mustard – and so on and so forth. I bags the reflexive sounding ‘DJ Names’ – if not for me then at least for a fictional character.

Dr. Doolittle may be fictional, but David Attenborough is pretty close – and real. He’s not talking to them, but he’s mastered the fine art of Hanging Out with the animals. He’s always just popping up next to them – what a dude.
And in one of those minor magical moments – I saw this image on telly earlier tonight and thought it’d be great if there was a still of that somewhere on the internet.[[image:damitmeerkat.jpg:meerkat:center:1]]
It’s like the more I’m able to see things from different perspectives, the more I’m spun out by the diversity of weird and wonderful animals on the planet.

“Evans, too, says he has had some concern over this particular trend and what it all means. ”I do worry sometimes that parents are giving the message that children are possessions,“ he says.” – from here (article about using brand names as first names), reminds me a bit of a para in that Salon.com article I linked to a while back about the ‘metrosexual’ and how beckham had got tattoos of his kid(s?) names – ‘wearing them like a trophy’ – if I remember correctly. And, as you can imagine, that’s taken off as a trend bigtime.
And there’s all these people who are making up weblogs and writing them pretending to be their toddler. There’s a bunch of them in the Melbourne Blogs list. Maybe it’s a different issue – but it still seems like a kinda dipppy thing to do. And there was a lot of people subscribing to Triple R FM (during the last radiothon) who were subscribing in their child’s name — not that it got them a discount or anything – just to be cute I s’pose. The Breakfasters made a competition out of it – the youngest subscriber — and someone rang up from hospital and subscribed their 1-2 hour old kid. ?

Ps. – I would relink to that salon article but it’s saying ‘it can’t find that particular article now’ — which is something I’ve been coming across quite a bit with news sites — seriously fast link rot.

Y’know, for the last 14 years or so I’ve been deeply concerned about environmental destruction — and for a while I actually did something about it.
But now that Captain Planet is on the case everything is just dandy.
That’s right kids, relax – everything will now be done for you.

A couple of months back the first Gloria Jeans coffee joint opened in downtown Geelong. A little while after the first juice joint opened across the road and a few doors down. Where they have a couple of food processor and (I guess) will make a fresh zuccini juice for you if you so desire. The decor of the place is limey green with bits of orange — dunno its name.
My sources tell me that the way G.J. is operated in Melbourne is that there’s this one woman who has the franchise license for the whole city. Kind of reminds me of fiefdoms. The point I’m trying to make here is that although the brand name is international, the operation isn’t necessarily 100% completely being orchestrated from Corporate Park, EvilTown, USA.
But I still smell a conspiracy because a G.J.s is opening up down the street here in the fabulously cosmopolitan Geelong West … and what do you know? A juice joint is also opening up about 15 numbers down on the same side.

To Be Continued….

comments:
Jonthe spork
date: 2003-10-29-08-48
There is a juice joint near nearly every GJ’s here too – but they didn’t arrive withing months of eachother so I will postpone any conspiracy theories =). For now.

Been flicking through the November issue of LinuxFormat magazine this weekend. There’s an article on PHP5 in it, which would appear to bode well for those of us running weblog systems powered by PHP. This new version will include sqLite – which is good for archiving stuff without needing MySql — which if you’re in the situation of renting webspace on a server – usually costs extra. Also there’s something about XML in there that sounded good. I didn’t really understand it.

Gentoo 1.4 is on the mag too — except I haven’t quite figured out how to burn it to a CD.

They had a news article about how IBM will be upping the ‘we love Linux’ ante later this year with a 90 second television commercial (TVC) that attempts to explain Linux to people in a round-about manner.It portrays Linux as a 9 year old kid who is a super-intense learner. It can be viewed here at the IBM website – in Real, Quicktime or windows media.
Ironically, with my effort and set up of Linux on this computer – I can’t watch it (but there’s a script of it too – more my style anyway) — if my Linux was a kid – it’d be the kid who got his head stuck in between the legs of the in-store “on a park bench” statue of Ronald McDonald at McDonalds.

That model isn’t pictured on this page but I’ll get a foto of one next weekend once I get my new kamera and go on a trek through belmont (aka smelmont).
I notice two of the entries in the “The Misadventures of Ronald McDonald” bit of that page are about australia. Alright! Fight The Power.

Y’know there was car racing at Gold Coast today – and just like last year it was a total demolition derby and ridiculous to watch. There’s one car whose main sponsors are Eli Lily and McDonalds and I’ve mentioned before about how I wish ill upon it — not that I want the driver to die, just for the car to have a bit of a prang or conk out — and it did again today – good you tool of evil car.
But it did win a couple of times – once over in france or germany and there was this freaky bit of footage from after the race where the car pulled up and the driver jumped out for interviews and (a person dressed up/made up as) Ronald McDonald ran up and stood behind the driver because it was a photo-op situation. But damn it looked weird and uh creepy. The clown is yet another indicator of that corporation being a 20th century dinosaur that’s on the way out.

This is another bit that cropped up in the mass media recently that caught my interest.
It’s horse racing season in this part of the world, whooppee-doo, except there’s this one horse come from England called Jardine’s Lookout – and he absolutely refuses to travel without his friend, Henry the pony. And here’s some pictures of them.
It cost 30 or 70 thousand just to bring Henry out here, but J.L. chucks a spaz if Henry’s not around.
J.L. : “Listen, I’m earning you huge wads of cash, you’re constantly flying me round to all these gigs – I never get a break — so just gimme my frikkin’ pony Okay?”

Someone should make Henry the Pony t-shirts.

comments:
Jonthe spork
date: 2003-10-27-19-57
I actually made 2 bucks on the races this weekend – otherwise I’d believe Henry the Pony was running in the races I picked =). (For reference we usually put a dollar on each race at either Sydney or Melbourne each weekend for fun =) )

name: yak sox
date: 2003-10-28-08-06
It’s like footy tipping – the less of an ‘expert’ you are with it, the more chance you have of picking the right one.

I heard the other day that next year’s tour de france is starting in Belgium. And when paying a little more attention to it all this year I found out that they have a tour de spain and and italian version too.
And so I propose that they combine all of these and maybe just call it ‘le tour’ because it was heading that way anyway — and have the cyclists ride around europe all year round. During the height of summer it could cruise up through scandenavia and then in winter it could stick to the southern bits like spain and the bottom of the boot. When riders collapse permenently they could be replaced by others to keep their teams going. It’d be a huge ratings success.

I changed what kind of wiki I’m using because the last one caught on fire.TipiWiki – is neat because it makes valid xhtml. The codey bit it uses to get bold, italic etc. seem a bit quirky but that’s probably just me who hasn’t used wiki much.

Golly, it almost doesn’t seem right to be switching to daylight savings on sunday. I think satan has taken over my bit-that-I-type-stuff-into because I keep making typos — much more than normal. Maybe it’s just a bug. I may have to report it to Pivot Central Command, dubbing it the Satan-Bug.

comments:
Jonthe spork
date: 2003-10-25-14-20
Hmm yeah there aren’t too many wiki’s out there that produce wiki content in xml and then render it out as xhtml with xslt.

goddamnyou charles manson
it’s your fault this column is so slow
and peppered with dud entries
that stare back at me everyday droning mediocrity
goddamnyou charles manson
this fixed width guff is your doing
messing my line lengths
goddamnyou charles manson
long hair and beards went out 25 years ago
and your album really sucked.

Nothing witty or brief today. Just long, sulf-indulgent and without much point.

I was out walking the other day thinking about possible banner graphics for future site redesigns and got thinking about a photo of me riding that lion that’s in this foto – riding it like it was a bucking bronco – and me holding a flag of some kind. It might work except that I got nobody who would take a foto like that, and those lions are in the sitting down position, which just wouldn’t do.
‘But where would I find a big stone/metal lion that’s in standing up position?’ I thought. And almost as if it was meant to happen, I walked past the house that had this lion (the black one) out the front (It’s one a curcuit I like to walk now and then) and I had a closer look in the gate and Great Snakes! – down the little path and just outside the house’s front door were two similar black metal lions – except standing up and looking menacing to all who would use the path.

It’s too much like a Lame-Arse stunt to invade someone’s frontyard and get pictures of yourself riding their lions, yahooing and carrying on… but boy it’s tempting.